Deeplinks Blog posts about Anonymity

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco will hear oral arguments Tuesday in Doe v. Harris, EFF's challenge to California's Proposition 35, which requires registered sex offenders to turn over all of their Internet identifiers and service providers to local law enforcement authorities.

Many people want to build secure Internet services that protect their users against surveillance, or the illegal seizure of their data. When EFF is asked how to build these tools, our advice is: don't start from scratch. Find a public, respected, project which provides the privacy-protecting quality you want in your own work, and find a way to implement your dream atop these existing contributions.

So, for instance, the New Yorker's Strongbox, a dropbox for anonymous sources, uses Tor as its basis to provide anonymity to its users. If you want anonymity in your app, building your tool on top of Tor's backbone means you can take advantage of its experience and future improvements, as well as letting you contribute back to the wider community.

In one of the most significant leaks to date regarding National Security Agency (NSA) spying, the New York Times, the Guardian, and ProPublica reported today that the NSA has gone to extraordinary lengths to secretly undermine our secure communications infrastructure, collaborating with GCHQ (Britain's NSA equivalent) and a select few intelligence organizations worldwide.

EFF filed an amicus brief in an important case known as Du v. Cisco, where Chinese human rights activists have sued the US tech giant Cisco in Maryland federal court. The case alleges that Cisco knowingly customized, marketed, sold, and provided continued support and service for technologies used by the Chinese government to facilitate human rights abuses.

In his landmark report to the 23rd session of the Human Rights Council, Frank La Rue, the U.N's free speech watchdog, makes clear that anonymous expression and secure communication are critical for an open society. We gave you a quick look at that report yesterday. Now we want to take a deep dive into his support for your rights to anonymity and encryption, and what countries need to do to reflect his conclusions.